Vincent Porretta

Vincent Porretta

Language Engineer

Amazon

As a language engineer at Amazon, I develop and maintain the language models underlying Alexa that capture the meaning a customer intends when interacting with Alexa.   

Interests

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Spoken language processing
  • Foreign-accented speech
  • Visual World Paradigm eye-tracking
  • Second language acquisition and Bilingualism

Education

  • PhD in Linguistics, 2015

    University of Alberta

  • MEd in Foreign and Second Language Teaching, 2007

    Ohio State University

  • MA in Italian, 2006

    Ohio State University

  • BA in Italian, 2004

    Ohio State University

Skills

Linguistic Research

Language processing, Acoustic analysis

Teaching and Learning

Pedagogy, Curriculum Development

R

R, Shiny, R Markdown

Statistics

LMER, GAMM, Time-series Analysis

Languages

English, Italian, Spanish

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Language engineer

Amazon

Sep 2020 – Present Boston, MA
 
 
 
 
 

Sessional faculty

McMaster University

Sep 2019 – Apr 2020 Ontario
 
 
 
 
 

Sessional faculty

Brock University

Sep 2019 – Dec 2019 Ontario
 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral research fellow

University of Windsor

Jun 2017 – May 2019 Ontario
 
 
 
 
 

Postdoctoral research fellow

University of Alberta

Sep 2015 – May 2017 Alberta
 
 
 
 
 

Foreign Language Teacher

Bishop Hartley HS

Sep 2007 – Aug 2010 Ohio

R packages

PupilPre

PupilPre: Preprocessing Pupil Size Data

VWPre

VWPre: Tools for Preprocessing Visual World Data

Teaching

University Teaching

University-level courses taught

Workshops

Invited workshops taught

Collaborators

Lines between names indicate coauthorship on publications. The darkness of the lines indicates the number of joint publications.
Collaborators

Presentations

When 'bug' creeps into memory - False memories and foreign-accented speech

Punny and funny - Semantic association in pun reading

Investigating the comprehension and perception of reduced speech with pupillary response

Contact

Feel free to message me via LinkedIn

  • Amazon - Alexa Entertainment, 55 Pier 4 Boulevard, Boston, MA 02210